The Rise and Fall of Porn’s Julian Assange

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

A few years after WikiLeaks made a name for itself amassing a database of classified documents and government information, the adult industry faced a copycat: an anonymous online forum called Porn Wikileaks, which terrorized performers by leaking personal information, including the names of more than 15,000 adult actors and actresses.

Like the original site, the copycat professed to use leaks to fight corruption, borrowing the wording of their mission statement straight from the original WikiLeaks (more often than not, Porn Wikileaks amounted to an anonymous archive of rumors, homophobia, and racism). But the parallels between the two sites wound up going further than intended.

Around the same time that Julian Assange isolated himself in an embassy, Donny Long a.k.a. Donald Carlos Seoane—the man widely believed to be the founder of the copycat site—also fled the country, spent six years in exile, and then returned, semi-retired, all but isolated from the broader porn world, to live a contained life in a South Florida suburb. In the time since, Long has stayed mostly under the radar. Now, he told The Daily Beast, he is a “family man.”

Porn Wikileaks first appeared online in December of 2010, and almost immediately put the adult industry on edge. In March of 2011, the site exposed stolen STD-testing medical records from AIM Healthcare, a porn industry medical clinic (which closed down not long after the breach), according to a 2011 Gawker report. The anonymous login also allowed users to unleash torrents of racist, sexist, and virulently homophobic rumors on the internet.

The majority of these comments trafficked in name-calling and low-level doxxing—revealing a performer’s real name and whether they did crossover—meaning, both gay and straight porn. But for a select few, the site compiled extensive files with personal information—not only about the performer, but about their friends and family. For one ex-porn star who spoke to The Daily Beast at the time, the site included photos of her father, mother, sister, and the homes where they lived.

Since the start of Porn Wikileaks, Donny Long, a Florida boat mechanic turned porn star, has denied he was the founder and maintains that he only “supported the project.” However, he has been linked to the pornwikileaks.com domain and several similar websites, according to a lawyer who obtained his GoDaddy records.

Long aroused suspicions early on, in part because the website, which trades in brutally homophobic slurs, often echoes the hateful language Long has espoused since his early days in porn. “I don’t like queers and I made it known,” he told The Daily Beast. “I don’t want to stick my dick where there’s a bunch of HIV-infested cum in a hole.”

Before he got into porn, Long grew up in Kendall, a suburb of Miami. He spent his early years working on boats, before dropping out of the 9th grade to work in a marina full-time. In 1998, he picked up a felony for burglary of an unoccupied dwelling, according to Miami Dade court documents. In the 2000s, he briefly owned a used boat dealership, buying old models from insurance companies and flipping them to sell. But Long got out of the business when customer reviews and tourism in the Keys went south, or as he put it, when “the media shut [him] and bunch of people down with their fake news.” Instead, he went to work in sales at another boat shop. It was a boring job, he said, with a lot of down time that he filled watching porn.

“The longer I stayed in the business, the more the homosexuals started to ruin the business.”

— Donny Long

Long entered the adult industry not long after, starting out in Miami amateur, before moving to Los Angeles to work with professionals. In the industry, Long built his career on attacking “crossover” actors and the women who worked with them. “The longer I stayed in the business, the more the homosexuals started to ruin the business,” Long said. “There were shutdowns. HIV vaccines. It traced back to a guy that was working in gay porn.”

When he briefly owned his own porn studio, Long said he “started a war with the Gay Mafia,” by putting pictures in the lobby of his studio of every actor who had worked in gay porn, in an attempt to “black ball every f*ggot working in straight porn.”

It turned out that it was Long who eventually left the L.A. adult entertainment industry, a failure he attributed to the rise of tube sites and the proliferation of free porn. He “had to downsize,” as he put it, and moved back to his hometown in Florida. “As soon as I did, all the warriors that hated me for years,” Long explained, “spread rumors all over the internet that I had flunked out of porn.” (He didn’t “flunk out,” he said, he was just “having fun... doing his own thing”).

Then Porn Wikileaks appeared, waging the same anti-crossover war Long had been waging while in Los Angeles.

The site was up until July of 2011, until a rival site appeared called The Real Porn Wikileaks, or TRPWL. The second site, whose name was intended to pull traffic from the original, logged into the original Wikileaks’ user log and found the personal information of its contributors.

The alternative site doxxed Porn Wikileaks users until they deleted whatever they had posted to the original site, according to Sean "ManWin" Tompkins, a Texas blogger who now runs TRPWL. A month after TRPWL began their counter campaign, Porn Wikileaks went offline.

By the time the site went dark, Long was living abroad. “I went to asia cause american [sic] women are fat and think they shit gold,” he told The Daily Beast. (At the time, he wrote on his website that he had “been forced to skip countries and watch [his] back everywhere because of the gay mob that started all of this.”)

Long spent six years in Thailand, where he got married, had a kid, got divorced, and married again. After a few years traveling in Latin America, he moved back to Florida with his wife, a cam girl who performs under the name Heather Deep. “My full-time job is taking care of my family,” Long told The Daily Beast. “It is what it is.”

Years later, Long claims he has moved on. Hours after speaking with me, he followed up to add: “One thing i cant stand also about the gay mafia is not just how they are cowards and only talk shit behind there [sic] keyboard…”

This article has been updated with new information about Long’s business history.